“17-year-old Grace wakes up in a white room, with a table, pens and paper - and no clue how she got here.

As Grace pours her tangled life onto the page, she is forced to remember everything she’s tried to forget. There’s falling hopelessly in love with the gorgeous Nat, and the unravelling of her relationship with her best friend Sal. But there’s something missing. As hard as she’s trying to remember, is there something she just can’t see?

Grace must face the most important question of all. Why is she here? ”

—————-

It goes without saying that waking up in a completely white room with just a table, pens and paper isn’t an everyday occurrence in Grace’s life. The only person she has contact with is Ethan, who brings her her meals and is keeping her prisoner. But if she’s been kidnapped why is he so nice yet infuriatingly cryptic? And what the heck is she doing there to begin with? The answer is there but it’s not till Grace starts putting her story to paper that she sees the truth.

When I first read the blurb for Entangled I was totally intrigued. A girl in a white room and she doesn’t know how or why? Tell me more! That plus a killer cover and plenty of positive reviews, I was very eager to get my hands on a copy. By the end of the story, I wish I didn’t get sucked into the trap of pretty covers.

Now, there are plenty of people who will disagree with me since Goodreads has page after page of glowing reviews, but I just wasn’t feeling it.

Grace is not the type of girl I’d ever be friends with. She’s the type I would’ve shied away from in school since her lifestyle is something I was always taught was not the way good girls should act. I might not always like the main character or what they do but a good story can make me forget that, Entangled just didn’t quite deliver for me.

Is it petty to dislike a character because she drinks like a sailor? Every few pages Grace was doing something that involved alcohol and usually plenty of it. Whether it was meeting up with a friend (usually at a bar or pub), hanging out at home or attempting suicide, alcohol was there and it just started to seem excessive in the story. Plus at only seventeen she seems to have had more than her fair share of casual sex, it’s not till Nat comes along that she sleeps with someone she actually cares about.

Grace has some personal issues as well. Since her father’s death, her relationship with her mother has been distant and strained. Rather than deal with her feelings on both issues she turns to self harming for release. At first you feel sympathy for how she must be feeling and that she doesn’t have someone to really help her deal with her problems (most try to just make her stop rather than address why she does it to begin with), but when you see Grace more or less emotionally blackmail people not to abandon her or she’ll harm herself you see that Grace has taken things one step too far.

The alternating perspective of the story from the present to the past was well done and flowed without a hitch but the major plot point was kind of predictable. It wasn’t completely obvious and at one point I thought maybe I was wrong, but in the end, it turned out exactly as I thought which was a shame. The story ends on a hopeful note but still leaves a few things hanging which left me wondering how things would’ve played out and generally a bit unsatisfied, especially about who exactly Ethan was.

Entangled had a lot of potential and deals with some heavy issues but I don’t feel it handled them as well as it could have. I wanted to like Grace or at least be able to sympathize with her, but in the end I just couldn’t find a reason to like her. The only character I liked in the end was Devon. For many Entangled was a hit, for me it’s a miss.

Pages: 375
Publication Date: January 2011
Publisher: Pan Macmillan/Quercus
Challenge: Debut Author
Rating: : ★★★☆☆

Teaser Quote: “The same questions whirl round and round in my head:
What does he want from me?
How could I have let this happen?
AM I GOING TO DIE?”